A contemporary poetry blog

Tag Archives: Sophie Mayer The Cantor’s Daughter

Sophie Mayer currently teaches Creative Writing at King’s College, London, and is the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009) and Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009). She won an Eric Gregory award in 2004, and is included in Andy Brown’s lyric anthology The Allotment (Stride, 2006) and in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010). As well as writing regularly for Sight & Sound and Horizon Review, she blogs about books as deliriumslibrarian. She is a Contributing Editor at Hand+Star, and Commissioning Editor at Chroma.

The Private Parts of Girls (Salt, 2011) follows Alice down the rabbit hole, Kassandra onto Agamemnon’s boat, and Red Riding Hood into the forest: it conjures the most mysterious landscape of all, the mind of a girl – a girl who might be a dancer, a warrior-bride, a transatlantic traveller, the Messiah, sick of being compared to Sylvia Plath, airborne, born in space, or lost in a sunlit feld, discovering love. From Battlestar Galactica to The Clash, the poems mix tart, smart pop culture goodies into the dreamspace of fairy tales, as they take us on a journey – hallucinatory with culture lag – through the mind and body of a modern girl. This is poetry for Buffy fans (and Twilight haters), for readers who grew up with Angela Chase’s voice-over for their lives and Air’s soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides on their iPods, for everyone who ever wondered if Beauty secretly was the Beast.

Previous review quotes

“[Mayer’s] non-sequiteurs arrest you by their very strangeness, then draw you into a sensory chain where they seem just … true. Brilliantly disconcerting.”

– Luke Kennard

“Full of zest, variety and intellectual ambition. There is no such thing as a typical Mayer poem, diversity being her great strength. Dazzling.”

Lysa has stars tattoed on her feet. Did it hurt, that
art made scintillant point by point. I don’t
ask. Flexing its paleness against red tiles,
her foot says ‘no.’ She’s a dancer, after all,
always has been: her feet are an earthquake-
buckled landscape — somewhere beyond
pain or trapped eternally within it. Pushing up
on bruised pad and ball, she perches between
the toast crumbs and the broken tap. A spring,
and those toes — étoiles — are pointing out
towards me. Black painted nails, cracked beneath
(I’ve heard the stories). The stars pulse over
roped veins, startling calluses like galaxies
formed from the dust of grinding the self
into grace. Into light. Over the doorway
of the main room, there’s a photo that I love:
half-naked against the lens, bride-tulled, pale
breasts a blur — meteoric streak of her slanted
through silver and emulsion. Falling hard
into the black holes of her eyes, I almost
don’t hear her graphic yes to my unasked. Of
course it hurt, and what hurts more: wearing ink
away beneath tap shoes and cowboy boots,
fading in sunlight from midnight to twilit
blue. Her feet ache with dawn, she says:
dew cold under her skin. Old bones turn out
fossils of past leaps, seamed with bright striations.En pointe, arabesque. These carbonised remains
of what once took to the sky, one part
rock to one of fire, and fell to earth, blue into blue.

*

Easter Parade

Careful now. All the knives must be aligned
or the city falls. Twitch and wake. Rain

arrives with dawn — season out of time,
no butterflies or moths. Squirrels hunt cats,

cats shelter with foxes. The girls lounge
in the fallen blossom of cigarette ash.

They are more beautiful than they can
imagine, and not only to the low-slung

driver thumping bass like a blood-thrum.
In the doppler of his wake, they roll

their skirts up higher, compete to see who hates
their legs most. At night, they twitch, restless

with nicotine and vague desire (indeterminacy
is its nature) (and its power). They want

the world, those girls, and stickily compete
to see who hates it most. That’s how bad

they want it, with its extinctions
and expulsions, evasions, invasions and

evaporations. With every crack
that doesn’t break their backs, luck flips

them past the row of knives, the low-slung
bass, the sullen sky. Newly-hatched,

like rain at dawn, they glisten cold.
Cold, and ashing into beauty.

*

The Cantor’s Daughter

Her dress is alight with
god particles
and gematria, her velvet is night;
her brilliance as impossible

as a talking cat. Her name
is Córdoba,
is heart-flowering jasmine
and the lovers celtic-knotted